Contact information on an intelligent terminal, such as a smartphone, can be entered into a contact list, and may be input manually, imported by a SIM card, imported by a SD card, imported from a network data backup, and the like. As part of a contact list import process, duplicated or redundant information may exist. For example, multiple records may correspond to a same contact name, a contact may have a same telephone number, and/or other information (e.g. address, etc.). Furthermore, multiple records may correspond to the same contact name, a contact's telephone numbers may be different or not completely the same (i.e. there may be multiple numbers), and/or other information (e.g. address, etc.) may not be the same.
When encountering the above situations, a user may spend more time finding a desired number from a contact list, and may manually perform a merging processing on the redundant or duplicated information. Since a smartphone itself does not know what needs to be merged and what does not need to be merged (because there may be two different contacts having the same name), the user can only delete some redundant information and merge duplicated information through manual processing.
When processing the above redundant and/or duplicated information, a user typically opens contact entry information, selects an undesired record (i.e., the contact entry), and then deletes the selected record. Alternatively or additionally, the user may need to add information from other contact entries (e.g., adding a telephone number) into one of the contact entries, and/or may delete other contact entries. All of these processes require the user to carry out many complicated operations, for example, open many windows, and/or switch among different windows, which is inconvenient, and does not implement intelligent features of an intelligent terminal.